Archive for the ‘Jawbreaker’ Category

As much as i love Jawbreaker, i’ve never had any use for their lyrics. I mean that kind of commiserating, life-augmenting, giving voice to the twisted things inside to throw out at the person who twisted them so use that serves a lot of people. And fingers crossed i never have to. I was thinking maybe it’s because i’m less grouchy, but that just seems laughably impossible. Maybe i just haven’t come across the right people yet, but it’s just not in me to be this consistently hateful and sour.

I don’t think even Blake himself can keep it up. Like at the end of this where the venom keeps getting more and more feeble. e.g. “…Tell the kids that we will never have…” and “…if you hear this song a hundred times it still won’t be enough…” What is that but not easily shrug-offable? But it does kind of work when read in the moment as the pathetic, hack ammunition fired when the fight has gone on too exhaustingly long. This is the sound of someone hurt, in whose mind the only recourse is to hurt back. One of my favourite Jawbreaker songs, even though it’s off the “bad” album.

Sorry, faithful reader, but i had a busy social day for a change, so here’s a video of them playing this song. Blake was a handsome man. That, his forlorn preponderance for emotion and meaningful things, and his way with words when not spiteful, he must have been a dangerous guy!

“Too old not to get excited about rain and roads, Egyptian ruins, our first kiss.” He wrote good words. I haven’t run the numbers, but i think you might be able to chart Blake’s decline into an irrevocable curmudgeony cynicism through the Jawbreaker albums; and also the forces that aided that decline in the scene politics and bad, bad relationships that gradually took over his lyrics. This song couldn’t have been on Unfun or even Bivouac. It’s the result of that descent – a build up of memory, stain, jinx.

Apparently Jawbreaker stopped playing this song around 1989, refusing all requests for it in the remaining seven years they were a band. I don’t know why. There is probably a good reason for it. Being respectful about something, to someone, maybe? No longer wanting to stir up this song’s cause and sentiment? To be dicks to their audience? I would never shout out for it, but i would stand there in silent, earnest, telepathic hope that they would play it. I’d leave disappointed, but at least i wasn’t one of those people who shouts requests at bands. It is one of their very best songs. The opening 5-0-3 guitar line and how it returns after the breakdown in the middle.

This song kind of suffers from the “Single Effect” – that banner song of everyone’s preference, linked word-associatively with the band’s name, representing their entire output, standing out singularly (single-y) on the album filing the songs before and after it as nothing but the songs before and after it. In the age of compact discs it would be skipped to; in this age of mp3 it is downloaded in confinement to the rest of the album and its place on it.The kind of song so overplayed and overesteemed you never want to hear it or reverence for it again, which makes no sense because no one has ever played this song to me but me.

It’s still that kind of song to me. It has a place, a pedestal. It is THE Jawbreaker song. Everyone’s favourite. Bob Nanna’s favourite. Yet from the first time i heard it, with such reputation and exaltation behind it, it fell short with me. Bivouac is my favourite Jawbreaker album but this is my least favourite song on it. What is wrong with me?

Maybe i owe it to myself to read the lyrics more. I did this once and it made complete sense why it is so loved. Chesterfield King is a precise, beautiful, poignant, invigorating summation of the most cherished quietly desperate moments of life. Those moments i guess that are beyond me. THEY’RE NOT! DAMNIT! Fuck you. I’m alive. It’s because i don’t smoke, isn’t it? I know it is. It’s pointed out to me frequently.

I have this thing that i am really good at and that is being able to pick the origin of samples used in songs. My cataloguing nature has rendered me with all manner of annotations and information fragments, spread thin but sparse enough. It serves as a handy survival apparatus in public situations where i can offer single, precise answers, not opinion or insight, just enough to subsist. Of course, it is only the movie samples i get, literary ones, like the Kerouac in this song, go right over me. I used to have this Geocities (R.I.P.) site, ever under construction, that acted as a database for movie samples in songs. That was as worthwhile a contribution to the internet as my Australian drum tab site, or this whiny thing.

Finding out about Jawbreaker after the fact, and not in sequential order, it always struck me odd how simple their songs became later on. And how that scorn and that acid tongue developed. I think i prefer Bivouac and prior, but i’m obsequious and i don’t want that preference to seem as though i’m siding with all those wet blankets who led Blake to write Boxcar, etc. They were a great band, always. I was not there.